The #MeToo Social Media Craze Is Falling Apart as Truth About “Harassment” Comes Out

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the #MeToo hashtag exploded across social media. Women who had experienced sexual harassment and abuse came forward to make sure that everyone knew they had experienced suffering at the hands of men.

However, one writer for The Federalist thinks that the hashtag has gone too far.

In a sure-to-be-controversial piece titled “Ladies, You Haven’t Been Raped If Someone Catcalled At You,” Inez Feltscher said that the #MeToo social media movement hasn’t made a bit of difference for perverts like Weinstein while putting men without perverted designs on edge.

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“It’s not a real solution to suggest, as the Left does, that society should just ‘teach men not to rape,'” Feltscher wrote.

“The Weinsteins of the world won’t care, and the men who do need a better script for how to express interest in women should not be punished for ever-more-minor infractions in a culture that thinks that all displays of masculinity, whether gentlemanly or inappropriate, are equally sexist.

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“Meanwhile, the sleazeballs don’t give a rip about #MeToo, but good men are forced into questioning their own innocent interactions,” she said.

It isn’t that Feltscher hasn’t experienced catcalling or unwelcome come-ons.

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“Like most women, I’ve experienced my share of catcalling, and even a couple of sexually explicit comments and ‘accidental brush-ups’ on the street,” Feltscher wrote.

“If you live in a big city, you know you encounter approximately 1,000 jerks per day behind the wheel, on the escalator, and in the subway. Inconsiderate asses, regrettably, are everywhere. Some of them seem to think that their sexual commentary, as well as the sound of their car horns, needs to be heard.”

However, she says that the #MeToo approach isn’t the proper way to deal with this.

“Depending on the circumstances and my mood, I’ve found these advances anything from hilariously awkward to enraging,” Feltscher wrote.

“Either way, I mostly forgot them at maximum half an hour later, which is the appropriate reaction to minor incidents with unpleasant people.”

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Instead, she said that such encounters had been conflated with more serious ones by the #MeToo trend. And the truth is, in the hyped atmosphere of a social media hashtag campaign, serious cases of sexual harassment and outright sexual assault get lumped into the same category as simply unwelcome advances.

When a rude comment from a stranger is considered the same as full fledged sexual “harassment,” the word loses all meaning.

“Being discomfited for a few moments by some guy’s awkward pass is not the same as a boss dropping trou and telling a subordinate her job depends on how she handles it,” Feltscher wrote.

“Further, sexual harassment in the workplace, while a serious problem with real power dynamics that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored, is not the same as sexual assault and rape.”

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Feltscher also said that the left’s culture of enthusiastically promoting meaningless sex outside of marriage has led to confused views on the male-female dynamic.

“Our culture is at risk of becoming dangerously schizophrenic about sex,” Feltscher wrote.

“With the emotional whirlwind of ‘no judgement’ casual encounters hanging all around us and past social proprieties long jettisoned, we’re expected to be sexually dialed up to the max outside the boardroom, and interchangeable, sexless automatons inside of it.

“It’s in this confused environment that the truly predatory, both men and women, thrive,” she added.

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“The Left’s solution to this sexual whiplash is to introduce endless hoops and legalities to what will always be inherently ambiguous situations, stretching the concept of ‘consent’ to cover what was considered in earlier eras to be mere bad judgment, and stretching the definitions of harassment and assault to cover more minor occurrences,” Feltscher wrote.

“But consent alone is not a strong enough code of sexual ethics. Consent is complex, and as has been highlighted by the ugly details of the Weinstein and Fox News cases, consent can be manipulated, coerced, and preyed upon.”

Feltscher ends by suggesting that “maybe it’s time to reconsider some socially enforced boundaries around male-female interaction,” although not as strict as those between Mike Pence and his wife.

However, there are other ways of stopping predation, including reporting incidents when they happen and letting the police handle it. There may be Harvey Weinsteins in this world, but we shouldn’t be lumping everyone in with them, and we oughtn’t let them go for decades without punishment. That’s the way to take action — not a social media hashtag ripe for abuse for political ends.

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This sentence, made all the more powerful because it was written by a woman, sums it up perfectly:

“In our rush for universal female victimhood, we cheapen the experiences of real victims and create a more hostile environment for their #MeToo stories,” Feltscher writes.

But if the career of a couple named Bill and Hillary Clinton proves anything, it’s that to a left obsessed with pushing its agenda, “real victims” have never really mattered.

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